The Portuguese Grand Prix (Grande Prémio de Portugal) was a motorsports event held for several years, mostly in the 1950s and then in the 1980s and 90s. It was a Formula One race between 1958 and 1960 and between 1984 and 1996.
The first event was held on the Boavista street course in Porto on 17 June 1951 as a sports car race. The Grand Prix was moved to Monsanto Park, Lisbon, in 1954 as a one-off. The first Formula One race was held in 14 August 1958 in Boavista, followed in 1959 by a Grand Prix at Monsanto, return to Boavista in 1960, after which it was ended.
The name was resurrected for a sports car sprint event in the Cascais street circuit in 1964. The following two years, it was run for Formula Three cars.
The seeds for the return of the Portuguese Grand Prix were planted with the inauguration of the Autódromo do Estoril in 1972. The Estoril Grand Prix was held as a European Formula Two Championship event during the 1970s. In 21 October 1984, Portugal returned to the F1 calendar, ending the season, where Alain Prost won the race but failed to win the Championship by half a point. In 1985, the Grand Prix was moved to April 21 and held under heavy rain, the ideal conditions for Ayrton Senna to win his first race. From 1986, the race was held in what would become its traditional date, in the penultimate week of September.
After the deaths of Senna and Roland Ratzenberger in Imola in 1994, the Estoril track was changed, with a new chicane built in place of the tank curve, as a security measure. Estoril was then considered an unsafe and outdated track, and the last Portuguese Grand Prix was in Estoril on 22 September 1996, with Jacques Villeneuve as the winner. Estoril was planned to be the final of race of 1997 season, but improvements to the circuit were not finished in time, so it was replaced with the European Grand Prix, which was held at Jerez in Spain.
On April 4, 2009 Max Mosley stated that based on the quality of the Autódromo Internacional do Algarve circuit, the Portuguese Grand Prix could be integrated into the Formula One championship, as long as a commercial agreement with the Formula One Management is achieved.
Famous quotes containing the word grand:
“There is the grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne. He says NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes. For all men who say yes, lie; and all men who say no,—why, they are in the happy condition of judicious, unincumbered travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but a carpet-bag,—that is to say, the Ego. Whereas those yes-gentry, they travel with heaps of baggage, and, damn them! they will never get through the Custom House.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)